[News] Israel’s endgame in Gaza, an impossible mission

[Anti-Imperialist News]

 Israel’s endgame in Gaza, an impossible mission
By Daud Abdullah <https://english.palinfo.com/?p=250143>

Saturday 17-August-2024 -
https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/israels-endgame-in-gaza-an-impossible-mission
/

Throughout the war on Gaza the weapon of disinformation has been used with
lethal effect. From the beginning, Israel’s Western allies led the assault
on global public opinion. Untruths about the beheading of babies and rape
of Israeli women were repeated and overblown without verification. Other
fabrications that continue to gain currency include the claim that Israel
does not have an endgame in Gaza. Of course it does.

For Israel’s right-wing government, the ideal endgame is a second Nakba.
That requires the depopulation of every town and village in Gaza, and the
forced expulsion of survivors to the Egyptian Sinai. Eighty-four per cent
of Gaza’s territory is now under evacuation orders.

Calls for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza started long before ‘Operation
Al-Aqsa Flood’. In October 2021, Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich,
told Arab parliamentarians: “I am not holding any conversations with you,
you anti-Zionists…You are [here] due to a mistake because [Israel’s first
Prime Minister David] Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in
1948.”

More recently, in November 2023, Avi Dichter, the incumbent security
cabinet member and agriculture minister, announced: “We are now rolling out
the Gaza Nakba.”

“Gaza Nakba 2023. That’s how it’ll end,” he stressed.

Everything that has taken place in Gaza since October 2023 confirms that
there is indeed a plan. It is to make Gaza unlivable so that its
inhabitants would simply pack up and leave. Already, a total of 1.9 million
people, or nine in every ten in Gaza, have been displaced.

Even so, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s army remains
demoralized and substantially weakened. Senior army officers and officials
in the intelligence community have been openly criticizing the prime
minister, saying that the war is unwinnable. Army spokesman Daniel Hagari
caused uproar when he told Israel’s Channel 13 in June that “Hamas is an
idea, Hamas is a party. It’s rooted in the hearts of the people — anyone
who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.” He added: “To say that we are
going to make Hamas disappear is to throw sand in people’s eyes.”

Similarly, former Mossad deputy chief Ram Ben-Barak lamented the fact that
Israel is losing the war in Gaza. “This war lacks a clear objective, and
it’s evident that we’re unequivocally losing it,” Ben-Barak told Israeli
public radio. “We are forced to engage in fighting in the same areas and
end up losing more soldiers,” he said.

Faced with this reality of mounting losses of men and equipment, and the
refusal of hundreds of reservists to fight in Gaza, the Israeli government
has resorted to the supreme court to order the conscription of
ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the army. They were previously exempt
from military service. Whereas some 1,000 were expected to register on 5
August, only 30 actually turned up.

Like a desperate and compulsive gambler making the last throw of his dice,
Netanyahu has therefore decided to intensify the bombing of Palestinian
shelters across Gaza, claiming that a similar campaign was conducted by the
Allies during World War Two. According to his twisted logic, the Israeli
prime minister reckoned that by killing more civilians this would pressure
Hamas to surrender or even force the civilians to rise up against the
resistance. What he has failed to acknowledge is that after the destruction
of 58 German cities, neither did Hitler capitulate nor did the German
people rise up against him. Likewise, although the German Blitz of London
and other British cities in 1940-41 killed an estimated 40,000 people, that
did not force the British people to rise up against Churchill.

As it stands, there is nothing to suggest that Gaza’s civilian population
is about to seek refuge in Egypt or rise up against the Hamas-led
resistance. Israel’s ruling elite have clearly not learnt the lessons from
their 1982 invasion of Lebanon. At the time, their objective was to
eradicate fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the
country. In the end, they were drawn into a war of attrition that lasted
two decades until they were booted out in 2000. All that was achieved is
that they created the conditions for a resistance movement, Hezbollah, to
emerge with a military capability that none of the Palestinian forces
possessed then or now.

Having learnt the hard way from their 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, the
Biden administration has tried in vain to deter Netanyahu from a protracted
war in Gaza. For the US, what started as an operation to defeat Al-Qaeda
eventually turned into an operation of regime change and then state
building. Eventually, it spent two decades fighting in Afghanistan and
achieved none of its objectives.

Israel’s current war in Gaza bears distinct similarities to its
misadventure in Lebanon and the American fiasco in Afghanistan. Gaza has
evidently become the quagmire that was predicted. The ‘absolute’ defeat of
Hamas that was promised ten months ago is proving to be more distant and
difficult than envisaged. Worse still, the preferred option of expulsion
and reoccupation also seems unattainable. With or without an endgame,
Israel faces a mission impossible in Gaza.

*-Dr. Daud Abdullah is MEMO Director.*
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